Signs of r-selection – Affluenza

Only today would a person argue that they are not responsible for killing someone because they grew up with too many advantages:

At the time of the fatal accident, Couch, then 16, was speeding and had a blood-alcohol level of nearly three times the legal limit when he lost control of his pickup truck and fatally struck a stranded motorist on the side of the road and three people who had stopped to help…

“The parents seem to have a completely hands-off approach…”

Ethan Couch became known as the “affluenza” teen after the term was used during his trial. “Affluenza” has been a theory in sociological and psychological circles since the late 1990s to explain the impact of indulgent parenting, where the combination of affluence and indulgence creates a sense of invincibility and lack of accountability in the child, said Daniel Medwed, a criminal law professor at Northeastern University in Boston.

The Couch case appeared to be the first time it was explicitly offered as a defense.

But the notion of rich kids getting leniency based on their advantages sparked a public backlash against the theory, Medwed said.

“My hunch is this latest parole incident will mark the end of its use,” he said.

Things are turning K so it won’t work any more. If things are K, the only argument a K-strategist might accept is if unimaginable harshness everywhere broke someone. In that situation this guy might have gotten probation if he could argue that due to multiple amputations incurred during military service, and the loss of his life savings in a house fire, he had to work three jobs to support his four kids – and between that and his wife leaving him for the gardener he was depressed, and just lost himself that night and got drunk. Then, he might get sympathy.

The idea that someone would argue that they had too much money and were never punished before for all sorts of stuff, so they can’t really be punished now, is just one more bizarre mile marker on this weird, r-selected path we are traveling. Rabbits with no valid right to claim victim status are now reduced to claiming that their lack of victim status is a sign itself that they are a victim.

It is of course the drive to claim free resources, and a desire for the entire absence of any harshness. Only rabbits fully understand it.

Yet one more thing that will be resolved with apocalypse.